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Free Demo · Session 9 of 10

The public response

5-10 minutes

What You'll Experience

1

Meet Riverbend High, the worked-example school that runs through the whole course

2

Run a real prompt from Session 9 with ChatGPT or Claude

3

Judge the draft the way the course teaches — then compare it with Riverbend's run

The first public statement in a crisis lives forever. It is also the one written under the most pressure, with the least information, by the most tired version of you. The only fix is to write the bones of it before the crisis arrives.

Step 1: The Worked Example

In Session 1 every leader writes a one-paragraph Crisis Context for their own school. This is Riverbend High's. Use it for the demo, or swap in a paragraph about your own school.

At Riverbend High, our biggest risk shape is a fast-moving social-media incident involving named Year 11 students. The parent WhatsApp group is well-organised and vocal. Our exposure: parental escalation outrunning our communication response within the same evening. The failure mode I worry about: someone in SLT posting on the school account before legal sign-off, in good faith, and creating a worse week than the incident itself.

The under-50-word holding statement

The first public statement does three things: acknowledge what has happened in calibrated language, name the immediate response in progress, name the single point of contact. Under 50 words because every additional word is a foothold for misinterpretation.

Step 2: The Course Prompt · Public response drafter

In this task, AI is acting as an editor. Replace each [paste] with the Crisis Context above and the crisis shape you are preparing for.

Incident preamble · included on copy

Below is a description of a school incident. Do not name students, staff, or families even if I have done so in error — refer to them by role only. Do not invent details not present in what I have pasted. Do not speculate about legal exposure or safeguarding implications outside your remit — flag those as "needs legal review" or "needs DSL review" and stop. Tag any general-knowledge claims about schools as "general" so I can verify them locally.

You are drafting the three public-response artifacts for my Playbook. My Crisis Context paragraph is: [paste from Session 1]. The crisis shape I am preparing for is: [paste]. Draft three things. (1) The under-50-word holding statement: acknowledge in calibrated language, name the immediate response, name a single point of contact. Strict word limit: 50 words. (2) The follow-up template for 4–24 hours later: scaffold the longer statement with placeholders for the specifics that will only exist by then. (3) The named "no-comment triggers": the specific conditions (active investigation, ongoing safeguarding, sub judice matters, named-individual confidentiality) under which "we cannot comment while [X] is ongoing" is the disciplined answer, with the exact phrasing for each.

Step 3: Try It Now

Open your preferred AI tool in a new tab

Paste the prompt, fill in the [paste] placeholders, and send it

Read the three drafts it returns before you look at Step 4

Open ChatGPTOpen Claude

Build the whole Playbook

This demo was one prompt from one session. The full Crisis Management course includes:

  • 10 sessions of about 25 minutes, built on the CALM framework (Contain → Assess → Lead → Mend)
  • Your own School Crisis Playbook, one piece per session — first-hour plan, stakeholder pyramid, decision tree, comms templates, holding statement and post-incident review — exportable as PDF or markdown
  • 18 copy-ready AI prompts, each main prompt with Riverbend's worked run to calibrate against
  • A signed Crisis Discipline Pledge and Human Judgment Checks before anything goes public
  • A library of the 10 reusable leadership moves, one from each session
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